Updated First RW Mecha in the Sentinels campaign.....

[Seto Kaiba]

Hello, flamebait. Not touching that.

Not intended as such, I assure you. All I'm saying is that Tommy's using his authority as creative director to make the ASC look bad because the part of the fanbase he belong[ed/s] to, that vocal majority in their forums and polls, dislikes the saga and generally has little good to say about the ASC or its staff.

Uh, I didn't write that, that was Shadowlogan.

Sorry, got my CTRL-V's mixed up again.

Well, first of all, Shadowlogan has a point. There's AI, and then there's AI. Combat requires processing power that is far from minuscule, but there's a significant quantitative difference between "is that an enemy? Should I engage?" and "Who is that specific human being, what behaviors are they engaging in, are those behaviors criminal in nature, which crimes are those, what do all of the above mean for how the situation should be approached", [...]

Actually, if we're talking threat prioritization and other such combat-relevant processing, it's actually not going to be much different from law enforcement. Both are going to be concerned with "is that a target" (whether "target" means an actual target or a lawbreaker), identifying the target's behavior and the context thereof, and deciding how best to engage those targets it encounters with the equipment it has on hand. Even a combat service drone is going to need the ability to read the behavior of an enemy, because you don't want drones blundering into traps or gunning down a defeated enemy who's trying to surrender.

As far as recognizing specific individuals, facial and/or other forms of biometric identification aren't actually all that hard to carry off... when I was working on my MS in Computer Science, the uni where I was studying had biometric ID tech as one of the most popular choices for their undergraduate senior projects in the Comp Sci department. Dana was out not just in uniform (presumably with clearly visible rank insignia and/or a name tag) but she was bareheaded and not even wearing a pair of sunglasses, so that Garm could get the cleanest possible read on her face with the telephoto imaging equipment it was almost certainly equipped with. The rest is just a matter of where it stores the database of biometric data... does it carry it internally, or reference an external database wirelessly?

[ShadowLogan]

It's the only time we ever see one in any position to react to anything, and we know that the more advanced branch of the service didn't have an autonomous AI until decades later.

True, but what other protocols could have been in place while it was on the back of that hovertruck that might explain it's lack of action? We know the Golem was part of the force deployed in "Half-Moon" to assault the Masters beachhead, what we don't know is how effective it was (until the Masters used cap. ship cannons, in which case we can hardly fault the unit's performance).

Also have to consider how the AI was even setup to handle what amounts to a "game of chicken". It's approach could be to make the other guy flinch, which Dana did it was just in an unexpected direction.

A police action though is going to require a different set of responses than a military action. What are the rules of force for those situations? A police action is going to want to limit the amount of force and bring in suspects, where a military action may be less concerned with such action.